What I think is important about this site was that its development flowed almost entirely from the design – I know many sites roll through this method, but in our case we didn’t even start building the back office until we had a solid design – the designs dictated the functionality and the development flowed from there, it was a great way to do things as design elements suddenly became functional from mere mockups.

This was only possible because we already had a flexible codebase to build from and the site was relatively simple feature-wise (not to mention porops to the django templating system).

Here’s the kicker: total development time for this project was two weeks…

The other really cool feature is the XML import from Adobe InDesign – this change has allowed us to ensure quality and consistency by taking site copy directly out of the source documents (in batch, no less) so a full site update takes about 1 second given the XML files.